Folksy HQ Update – June 2024

What’s been happening on Folksy in June 2024

This is the first in what (we hope!) will be a regular update about Folksy as a service, so that you can see the work we’re doing to support our sellers, and the improvements we’re focusing on to make Folksy the best platform it can be for all our artists, designers and makers.

Key insights and stats – March to May 2024

Over recent months we’ve seen quite a few posts on our social media from small businesses (particularly bricks-and-mortar shops) that are sadly closing down, and we’ve also heard from some sellers in our forum and Facebook Clubhouse that sales feel slower than usual. Perhaps encouragingly given that backdrop, sales on Folksy over the last three months have been pretty much in line with the same time last year.

Overall, total order value over the last three months was up a fraction at 0.13% year-on-year.  

• March 2024 – orders up 8.9% on previous year
• April 2024 – orders down 2.7% on previous year
• May 2024 – orders down 6.6% on previous year
• Total order value over the last 3 months up 0.13%

Where people came from:

• 506k people visited Folksy in last 3 months (March, April, May 2024)
• 32% of those people came from social media (eg Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook)
• 26% of those people came from organic search (eg Google) 
• Pinterest was the biggest referrer* – bringing in more than half of all visitors from social media
• More than 50% of orders placed came from Google Search

*Tip: We have a whole section on the Folksy blog dedicated to Pinterest here – so have a read through for advice on how to get your products seen on this visual search engine. 

What we’re working on at Folksy this month

We use ‘Objectives and Key Results’ to help us focus our effort. This quarter (May-July 2024) our focus has been on attracting new visitors to Folksy and converting them into new buyers.

To meet our objective, one thing we prioritised was search engine optimisation. We identified six areas where we believe we can improve how Folksy ranks across Google, Bing etc.

Alongside this work we’ve also been scoping out improvements to internal search to make it easier for people to find relevant items and convert visitors from browsers to buyers. Currently less than 10% of people browsing then buying on Folksy use search. We feel we can increase the number of people purchasing by improving search and making it more prominent.

In spring we ran some user research with a selection of sellers, and we’re about to run another round of research, this time with buyers.

We’ve migrated to a new analytics platform called Mixpanel and we’re now tracking hundreds of behaviours across Folksy. This insight, alongside feedback we get from our user research, is helping us prioritise our development work.